Larry Flynt
Most probably know Larry Flynt as the guy who created Hustler, or the guy in a wheelchair who slurred his words and talked in a slow, almost-incomprehensible drawl.
But there’s way more to his story.
Flynt was one of the most important, impactful figures of the past four decades, someone who was involved in one controversy after another. He almost solved the mystery of who killed JFK. He nearly brought down the Reagan administration. He saved another president from being impeached.
Strap in for a wild ride.
THE 1970s
We’ll start in the late 1970s. Flynt’s Hustler had become the 3rd best-selling men’s magazine and made him untold riches. This was before the assassination attempt that left him paralyzed, and he was definitely no bumbling, word-slurring paraplegic at this time. Just listen to how passionate and articulate he is in this 1977 interview.
As his magazine grew, Hustler started publishing heavy, hard-hitting journalism that took on government injustices and conspiracies. Hustler was independently owned, which meant there were no corporate overseers dictating what topics could and couldn’t be discussed; anything and anyone were fair game.
Flynt’s favorite topic was the JFK Assassination, and, as the 15th anniversary of JFK’s death approached, Flynt took out a full-page ad in the Dallas Morning News offering a $1 million reward for information leading to JFK’s killers.
The offer caused a sensation. From the tips that poured in, Flynt put together a comprehensive issue of the LA Free Press (another magazine he owned), which he devoted to the JFK killing.
Killing Coordinated by CIA, proclaimed the front page
If you’re into the JFK assassination, the entire issue is a great read. Most of the facts and breakdowns in the article are well-known by now, but back in 1978, this was the first unveiling of much of this information.
As with most who take on the CIA, things didn’t go well for Flynt. A mere two weeks his JFK Killers Expose came out, Flynt was shot by a sniper and nearly died. Serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin was arrested for the murder six years later in 1984 but never convicted.
If you think it’s a coincidence that Flynt was shot by a sniper two weeks after linking the CIA to the JFK killing…well, I’ve got some beautiful oceanfront property in Iowa to sell you.
There was no doubt in Flynt’s mind who was behind the assassination attempt.
Washington Star, June 17, 1978
News-Journal, May 17, 1978
The violence soon spread to those close to Flynt. Immediately after he was shot, Flynt’s brother-in-law and Hustler sales manager William Rider had several sticks of dynamite explode beneath his parked car in his driveway. Rider survived.
A few months later, Flynt’s brother Jimmy Flynt and Hustler Vice President Bill Abrams were shot at by a sniper. One bullet hit Abrams three inches from his heart and nearly killed him.
THE DELOREAN CONNECTION
Flynt, now a paraplegic confined to a wheelchair, moved into a mansion in Los Angeles. Fueled by paranoia and pain, and convinced the government still wanted him dead, he rarely left the house.
Flynt protected himself with dogs and security officers.
As this documentary details, Flynt essentially turned his new residence into a fortress, complete with guard dogs and security officers armed with uzis patrolling the estate 24 hours a day.
A Flynt press conference at his mansion
Flynt succinctly explained his paranoia in a press conference held at his mansion: “If you knew the president of The United States had committed murder, and you could prove it, and the FBI and CIA works for him, would you leave your house?”
Throughout his isolation, he continued populating the pages of Hustler with hard-hitting journalism. There was a massive article investigating the death of Robert Kennedy, and another feature that brought mainstream attention to The Gemstone File, considered by some to be the mother of all conspiracy theories.
In 1982, Flynt broke one of his biggest stories: tapes of a bombshell drug smuggling bust involving the FBI and John DeLorean, the creator of the infamous DeLorean sportscar.
In one of the strangest cases of the 1980s, DeLorean’s car company was on the brink of collapse when he came up with a novel idea to save it: he’d partner with a few drug lords to smuggle 220 pounds of cocaine into the US, netting him a profit of around $19 million.
This wholesome plan failed miserably when the deal turned out to be a bust set up by the FBI. DeLorean was arrested and the story garnered headlines around the globe. DeLorean insisted he’d been pressured into the deal; the FBI claimed otherwise.
Then Flynt entered the picture. He’d supposedly purchased tapes from a contact in the government that proved DeLorean had been threatened by an FBI informant. Specifically, the conversation on one of the tapes went like so…
DeLorean: I don’t want any part of narcotics. I tried to tell you that in Washington when you first mentioned dope…All I ever wanted was an investment to save the company.
Hoffman: You honor your part of the deal and that way you’ll obviously live longer.
DeLorean: I just want out. I won’t talk.
Hoffman: How is our little daughter? Wanna get her head smashed?
DeLorean’s arrest was captured on hidden surveillance cameras
When television outlets and newspapers started reporting that DeLorean’s daughter had been threatened, the FBI’s case against DeLorean was ruined. The judge issued a subpoena for Flynt’s tapes and ordered him to appear in court and reveal his source for the tapes. When Flynt refused, he was fined tens of thousands of dollars each day he didn’t hand over the tapes.
He paid these fines in increasingly outlandish ways. First he paid with single dollar bills he counted out one by one.
AP, November 18, 1983
Then he paid with bags of money carried by dancers from his bars.
Flynt started showing up for court up each day in attention-getting outfits.
Flynt’s increasingly odd behavior became such a spectacle that it turned the DeLorean trial into the “Larry Flynt show.”
AP, November 18, 1983
Eventually, his daily contempt fines having totaled over $400,000, Flynt finally revealed the source for his tapes as “the samurai,” who, he claimed, was now in China receiving medical treatment after being injured as punishment for providing the tapes to Flynt. Perhaps as a way to end the ordeal once and for all, Flynt claimed the tape was a fake.
Fake or not, the bombshell tapes helped get DeLorean acquitted of the drug charges.
But Flynt’s biggest story was yet to come.
Alfred Bloomingdale: The 1980s Jeffrey Epstein
Throughout the 1970s and 80s, Flynt purchased a number of non-pornographic magazines and built a true magazine empire. In 1983, he launched The Rebel, which was Flynt’s most ambitious magazine to date.
The Rebel was a bi-weekly magazine solely devoted to exposing government conspiracies, coverups, and corruption: Newsweek with an edge. Flynt’s money and distribution connections ensured that The Rebel had wide circulation and a prominent place on newsstands; it was far more than some underground rag.
The 1st issue of The Rebel
Flynt hired an all-star group of journalists to staff The Rebel, including former Time writers and the legendary researcher Mae Brussel.
The first issue of The Rebel dropped bombs, exposing the infiltration of the US government by Nazis after WWII, the Iran Contra controversy three years before it became mainstream, and the FBI’s secret campaign to destroy Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement.
The government was not pleased with The Rebel; Flynt said so in the first issue.
“The government, in particular the Reagan administration, is determined to stifle any independent voice, like this magazine, that is dedicated to exposing the lies that are the working tools of big government and big business,” Flynt wrote in The Rebel’s first issue.
Flynt was just getting started. A few issues later, he covered a massive bombshell involving President Reagan, even featuring the president on the magazine’s cover.
Reagangate, as it was branded, was basically the 1970s and 80s version of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. It involved a girl named Vicki Morgan, who was allegedly a mistress to one Alfred Bloomingdale, close friend of Reagan’s and the heir to the famous department store.
Alfred Bloomingdale: Just kinda looks like a guy with a sex dungeon in his basement, doesn’t he?
Turns out that Bloomingdale had a bit of a secret. He was the guy who many high-level politicians relied on to procure sex partners for them – and had for decades, dating back to when Reagan was governor of California. And not normal sex, either. We’re talking weird shit like whips and chains and masks.
AP, Sept. 28, 1982
When Bloomingdale died in 1982, Morgan was cut off from the $18,000 monthly allowance he supplied her with. She quickly went broke and filed an $11 million palimony suit against Bloomingdale’s estate.
During this lawsuit, she told her lawyers everything: the lurid sadomasochistic sex acts she’d performed for decades and who’d she’d been forced to do them with – including many high-level politicians in the Reagan administration.
If this sounds far-fetched, it really shouldn’t. The Reagan administration was caught up in a different sex scandal a few years later, when it was discovered that homosexual prostitutes and teenage boys were given “midnight tours” of the White House.
Many of the children involved spoke out and described these late night rendezvouses as orgies involving VIPs from the highest offices in Washington DC.
Back to Vicki Morgan. Her shocking deposition during her $11 million lawsuit took an unexpected twist when she claimed that Bloomingdale not only supplied prostitutes to political VIPs for kinky sex…but that he’d wired his mansion/brothel with hidden cameras to secretly record everything.
And she claimed that she was now in possession of those tapes…tapes that were so explosive, they would “make Watergate look like play school.”
But shortly after revealing this information, on July 7, 1983, Vicki Morgan was bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat. Which is totally coincidental and just a random occurrence, I’m sure. Morgan’s roommate Marvin Pancoast was arrested for the murder in one of the most obvious ‘Let’s just frame some poor schmuck for this murder’ scenarios ever.
Right after her death, Morgan’s lawyer Robert Steinberg created a firestorm when he held a press conference announcing that he now had the tapes – they showed, among other things, Bloomingdale, a former U.S. Congressman, and two others currently holding high posts in the Reagan administration participating in “sex parties.”
The tapes, Steinberg claimed, could “bring down the Reagan government.”
But Steinberg’s bombshell was reduced to ashes days later when he revealed that the tapes had been stolen from his office. The elusive “Vicki Morgan tapes” became a running punchline on late night talk shows.
Then Larry Flynt showed up and the situation got even wilder (of course it did). He claimed that he was now in possession of the Vicki Morgan tapes. To prove it, he gathered a small group of media members and played the tapes for them. A feature in the San Francisco Guardian describes what the journalists saw:
Flynt’s massive “Reagangate” article for The Rebel revealed the entire saga in lurid detail.
THEN…SOMETHING HAPPENED
It might never be known what happened next…but something clearly happened. After the Reagangate article, The Rebel completely vanished — all contributors were fired — and Hustler was purged of its investigative writers and articles.
Flynt collaborator Mae Brussell claimed that the government finally decided to do something about Flynt because the articles in The Rebel were simply too explosive. Brussell was in regular phone contact with Flynt during this time, and she gives a running update of their conversations in her bi-weekly radio broadcasts. In broadcast #624, she was gravely worried for Flynt’s life because she’d learned that the CIA’s deadly ‘A’ Team — G. Gordon Liddy of Watergate fame, Gordon Novel (long suspected of being the infamous Umbrella Man in the JFK assassination), and Mitchell WerBell (a mercenary who was heavily featured in Jim Hougan’s book Spooks; some believed WerBell was the deadliest spy in the world during this time) — had all inexplicably moved into Flynt’s mansion.
Brussell was convinced the ‘A’ Team was using the government’s famed MK-Ultra programming on Flynt, slipping him a variety of mind-altering drugs to drive him insane. Flynt, Brussell claims, was essentially a prisoner in his home, not unlike Howard Hughes a decade earlier, being heavily drugged to scramble his brain. Liddy, Novel, and WerBell were the ‘handlers’ who fed him drugs and regulated his contact with the outside world.
If true, it would explain Flynt’s behavior during this time, which was certainly odd:
Flynt told Brussell that he was planning on flying an airplane over the ocean and jumping out without a parachute — he even contacted Soviet Union leaders to inform them of his plan.
He then told Brussell a neutron bomb would be dropped on Los Angeles and they needed to evacuate the area immediately.
Flynt showed up to a court hearing (with WerBell at his side) wearing an American flag draped around his waist. This desecration of the flag resulted in a lengthy stint in a Missouri federal prison.
During a separate court appearance for his Jerry Falwell case, Flynt was completely dazed and out of his mind during his testimony.
Oh, and Flynt’s wife Althea got AIDS around this time (injected with it as punishment?).
Flynt also announced his intention to run for President in the upcoming election. As with most things Flynt did, the news garnered considerable publicity…but in early 1984, right around the time the Reagangate article ran in The Rebel, Flynt abruptly ended his bid for President.
So, to recap, in early 1984, Flynt published really bad things about the Reagan administration and his life fell apart.
DID HE SAVE BILL CLINTON?
The next major Flynt bombshell didn’t happen for another decade, but it was arguably as impactful as Reagangate.
In 1998, things were not going well for President Bill Clinton. Allegations in The Starr Report had led to Clinton’s impeachment. Monica Lewinsky and Paula Jones were everywhere, talking about their relationships with him. Louisiana GOP Congressman Bob Livingston was one of the loudest voices demanding Clinton’s resignation – and now Livingston was about to become Speaker of the House.
Around this time, Flynt ran an ad in The Washington Post:
Flynt claimed to receive thousands of calls in response. A few were from women who claimed to have had extramarital liaisons with Livingston. Mere days after hearing that Flynt supposedly had dirt on him, Livingston abruptly resigned as House Speaker, before he’d even served a day in the role. The stunning development played a huge part in saving Bill Clinton’s presidency — one of the ringleaders in the hearings abruptly resigning all but killed any impeachment momentum as talks shifted from the House to the Senate.
The Observer, December 21, 1998
Flynt claimed his $1 million prize dredged up dirt on more — many more — politicians. Speculation on what Flynt had and who he had it on was the talk of Washington for awhile.
Flynt claimed that he didn’t think it was fair for Clinton to be put on trial for his sexual indiscretions, when plenty of others in Washington were guilty of the same.
But many speculated that there was far more to the story – that Flynt was either an intelligence asset (FBI or CIA) or a Clinton asset, being given these photos and videos to bring down their enemies.
After all, only Republicans were being targeted by Flynt – he admitted it himself.
The Washington Post, December 18, 1998
Shortly after Livingston resigned, Flynt published allegations about Bob Barr, who was also one of the leaders in Bill Clinton’s impeachment. The allegations almost led to Barr’s resignation. The fears about who Flynt would target next became so intense that some wondered if Flynt would bring “political ruin” to the entire Republican party before the 2000 election.
But once it was clear that Clinton would survive his impeachment, Flynt never released the other files he claimed to have. Blackmail has been used in Washington for decades – perhaps Flynt (or the people pulling his strings) were holding onto his files for blackmail?
Years later, Flynt would make similar million dollar offers in attempts to take down Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, and Donald Trump, but nothing came of the offers.
So that’s Larry Flynt, a guy who had a nose for controversy like few others. History will probably remember him as the porno mag guy but he was far more than that.
A nonconformist. A misfit. And, like the namesake of his gone-too-soon magazine, a Rebel.